A Mother's Ordeal
Mosher, Steven W.
F our decades after Chairman Mao commended women for holding up half the sky, the edifice he erected is keeping them tied to the ground. Nowhere is this more apparent than in China's coercive...
...It would be inconceivable that someone in the crew did not check the cross track numbers, which gives the distance in miles from the planned track...
...TWA Goodwill Ambassador Howell, New Jersey Upon reading James Oberg's article, I am somewhat confused on a particular point...
...Second children are absolutely banned," she was told...
...Why should anyone be allowed to have more children than I? But Chi An's story takes an ironic twist when she finally leaves China with her one little boy to join her husband who is studying in the U.S...
...Deadheading crew members are usually referred to as "non-revs," (non-revenue producing...
...To this day, I do not know why CBS sat on this story...
...While abroad, Chi An becomes pregnant...
...It assumes that the crew was totally incompetent...
...The CVR was obviously mounted in the cockpit, and the FDR was mounted in the rudder...
...Nowhere is this more apparent than in China's coercive population pro- gram—which limits each family to one child...
...In her latest tour of Asia, for example, Rep...
...In truth, Chi An's campaign against the one-child policy did not begin until she became pregnant while with her husband in the U.S., and it occupies only a small part of the book...
...The notation reads "1200 D/H...
...The fact that a B-747 never ditched at sea is totally irrelevant...
...Freeman went on to be secretary of agriculture in Jack Kennedy's cabinet...
...My own guess is that the notation refers not to deadheading passengers but to a minimum-descent-altitude "decision height" which would be published on the approach charts for the specific destination airport...
...Incidentally, Gov...
...Harry W. Sandberg, M.D...
...Western attention, both pro and con, has fixed almost exclusively on forced abortions...
...Johnson makes reference to a notation written by the pilot of KAL 007...
...The fact that the entry "1200 D/H" was scratched out and moved further down on the manifest...
...Chi An eventually applied for, and received, asylum from the Reagan administration, with Steven Mosher's help...
...All of this was known to CBS, and to Charles Collingwood in particular...
...A memo "falling into the hands of Yeltsin officials" is just too cozy to be believable considering the source, be it the U.N...
...Far from being a saint, Chi An comes across at times as cold-hearted and selfish...
...The silence has been glaring among "women's" activists, especially considering that female babies are much more likely to be aborted...
...ment...
...In fact, forced abortion is not so much the premise as the culmi- nation of a state policy that controls hu- man reproduction as it would the yearly output of a steel factory...
...scolded the Chinese for human-rights abuses but uttered not a peep about its one-child policy...
...Johnson makes much of the fact that the "sinister" notation was entered, scratched out, and then entered further down on the weight manifest...
...After her own abortion, Chi An be a work in the women's clinic of a state- owned factory...
...This record keeping was done publicly, by writing each woman's name, means of contraception, and expected date of menstruation on a large blackboard that hung in a conspicuous place...
...But that does not take away from the story's value as an insider's view of China's population program...
...Ultimately Ah Fang went into labor, but not before begging Chi An to let her have her baby...
...The U.N...
...McNeil, whom I subsequently worked with, submitted this theory as the only possible way the plane could have gotten to where it supposedly was...
...Neither the cockpit voice recorder, nor the flight data recorder, was mounted on "the rear bulkhead...
...Why couldn't they understand that we clinic workers were not personally responsible for our actions...
...The INS is checked at regular intervals...
...bullied into signing a one-child agree...
...In the sidebar titled "Useful Idiots: An Honor Roll," R.W...
...Although Chi An had some qualms about what she had done, her boss congratulated her, because Ah Fang had not only been aborted but sterilized...
...And when China protested he found himself kicked out of Stanford's doctoral program...
...t Ah Fang and other "pleaders" were the "toughest to deal with": Some went into the operating room still begging, making everyone uneasy and uncomfortable...
...Bobby was sent to Sen...
...I, too, had only one child...
...A sickly child who grew up duri the Cultural Revolution, Chi An tells 01 her modest ambitions to become a nurse get married, and have a family...
...I found the article by James Oberg on the KAL tragedy not quite "the real story" ("KAL 007: The Real Story," TAS, October 1993...
...What came back to them was shocking...
...Chi An faithfully followed his dictum even with her best friend, Ah Fang, who had enraged Chi An by becoming "illegally pregnant" and then hiding out in another town to have her baby...
...After all, Deng Xiaoping did say: "Use whatever means you must to reduce the population, but do it...
...Instead, Chi An informed her boss and Ah Fang, in heavy labor, was pulled onto the back of a truck, rushed to the hospital and aborted...
...That theory came from Inspector Joe McNeil of the FAA's New York Flight Standards Office, and was submitted to ICAO as a review by the Air Navigation Commission on November 17, 1984...
...It must be checked for ground speed every time a waypoint is crossed in order to give an accurate ETA for the following way-point...
...As Chi An recalls: Every shop and office in the factory had a [Women's] Federation representative, whose job it was to track the menstrual cycles and the contraceptive methods of all young women of childbearing age who worked there...
...Nobody, including McNeil, was really happy with this theory, however...
...on cold statistics...
...A s for the women who become pregnant anyway, the state has an answer for that as well...
...Official government statis- tics cite a 25 percent surge in ster- ilizations...
...A positive pregnancy test spelled trouble for a woman with a child...
...If a woman failed to start her period on schedule, the Women's Federation representative would order her to go to the women's health clinic for an examination...
...did not get the theory of the constant magnetic heading of 246° from the USSR's recovered flight recorder...
...But the current administration and the human-rights establishment have been noticeably silent on the population program that even the New York Times called "draconian...
...Yet Bill Clinton's only explicit action affecting China's population program was to restore funding for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) that helps pay for it...
...Also, if there were six people deadheading, 1200 would make them a rather corpulent lot...
...After accidently becoming pre& nant with her second child, Chi An fount herself subject to "remedial measures"— for in China conceiving without govern- ment permission is a crime...
...Perhaps this is what Peng Peiyun, minister of the State Family Planning Commission, was referring to when she told the South China Morning Post that "we in China consider it to be persuasion and reasoning until [the woman] agrees...
...Women occasionally lied about the onset of their menses, but of course it was only a matter of time before they were found out...
...candidate...
...In this case, 1,200 feet above sea level...
...They reported and speculated on Richard Nixon's purportedly secret night flight to confer with Nelson Rockefeller in New York...
...That is the only conclusionthat can be drawn if one is to accept the constant 260 magnetic heading theory...
...or the Soviets...
...It was sinologist Steven Mosher who first broke the story of the one-child poli- cy more than a decade ago...
...Like mosChinese women, too, while she did nofavor abortion, she was not opposed to i either, not least because she believe( China's population growth had to be curbed, whatever her personal distaste for the procedure...
...The debate exploded into the head- lines again this spring, when China released figures showing its population growth had hit an all-time low, exceed- ing goals the Chinese themselves hadn't figured on reaching until the year 2010...
...Symington's suite to withdraw the offer and to ask him to be silent about it...
...Linden, California KALorama As a retired airline captain...
...Not only did Chi An have her friend hunted down, she had her tossed into the storeroom in an advanced stage of pregnancy...
...Since the family planned on eventually returning to China, Chi An and her husband agree to write to her former colleague at the population control office, certain that an exception would be made since they were no longer in China...
...At that altitude, if the approach could not be safely executed, the aircraft would then go around for another try at the approach or fly to an alternate airport where meteorologic conditions were better...
...When her period came, she was required to place a check mark next to her name...
...She thus became part 01 an all-encompassing population prograrr that begins with state-allocated "bir quotas" (of one) for which women musfirst apply, mandatory contraception, and sterilization...
...Everything is done for the convenience of the state: Chi An reports that steel IUDs—one size fits all—are used instead of the healthier plastic alternatives because they show up on the women's quarterly inspection X-rays...
...If you cannot have this abortion done abroad, then the factory director orders you to return to China immediately...
...For the book is a first person narrative by a Chinese nurse named Chi An, who was both enforce] and victim of this policy...
...The doctors were only following orders...
...The description of "aviation gas spraying wildly" is a figment of the author's imagination...
...It should always be zero, or a very low number...
...Chi An herself became something of an expert in locking up women in a storeroom until they "agreed" to abort...
...Insp...
...T he book's subtitle—"One Woman's Fight Against China's One-Child Policy"—is somewhat misleading, in that it makes Chi An out to be some kind of crusader...
...I was only a minor functionary...
...Like oth• ers, when she did finally many, she ww...
...Naturally the subject of coercion has been raised, and even the New York Times and Washington Post devoted front-page attention to the statistics and the abuses they prefigured...
...The fuel is basically kerosene, with a few additives...
...Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal...
...Besides, I, too, had been compelled to have an abortion...
...CBS had hired the son of then governor of Minnesota Orville Freeman, ostensibly as a page, but in reality as a messenger carrying information from his father to CBS reporters...
...Edward J. Toner, Jr...
...Symington was told he could have any other position he desired in return for his silence, but that Lyndon Johnson was the V.P...
...Anything over five miles left or right of track is cause for immediate action...
...In the mean- time, Americans elected a president who had campaigned on forcing Peking's adherence to human rights...
...Even the most personal information is treated as a matter of state record...
...At least where these pleaders were concerned, my sympathy soon gave way to irritation...
...Chi An mentions how some doctors performed so many tubal ligations that they reportedly felt as if they were "spaying cows...
...GI CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 10) Jack and a panic meeting was called...
...According to the South China Morning Post, "one report says 113 boys are being born for every 100 girls...
...About 5:00 a.m...
...since there were no other witnesses, Chi An could simply say that Ah Fang had had her baby alone...
...In his latest book, A Mother's Ordeal, Mosher tells much more about the poli- cy, but in a way that puts a human face Julie McGurn, formerly of the Eagle Forum, is a writer living in Hong Kong...
...as of 1991, 12.5 million had undergone the procedure...
...Perhaps she has more compelling loyalties...
Vol. 26 • December 1993 • No. 12
